


This Heart Between Us Could Start a War

by epistolic



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-19
Updated: 2011-08-19
Packaged: 2017-10-31 15:02:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/345466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mycroft called it loneliness, but then, what did Mycroft know anyway. Sherlock/Moriarty, AU in the sense that John doesn't exist.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Heart Between Us Could Start a War

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Притяжение между нами способно разжечь войну](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3575174) by [Julia_Devi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Julia_Devi/pseuds/Julia_Devi)



> Reposted from [my LiveJournal](http://knowmydark.livejournal.com/55816.html#cutid1) for archiving purposes! ♥

They come out of the building covered in ash, grey and char-black in their collars and hair, in the creases of their palms. Sherlock licks his lips and tastes it. Sweat and adrenaline. The quick rush of air into his lungs, and for a second, in the dark, he’s completely blind.

“Oh my,” Jim says next to him, all drawn-out vowels. Sherlock catches a high, inelegant giggle, and then Jim is snaking an arm through Sherlock’s elbow, tucked snug right against his side. “Haven’t _we_ been bad.”

“Are we walking?” Sherlock says.

“Why not?” Jim says, his mouth tipping up slyly. “Or have I worn you out?”

“We’re a little conspicuous,” Sherlock says as he steers them into a small side-street, not taking the bait. “We both look like we’ve fallen into a tip. A very large, very dirty, very explosive tip.”

“You,” Jim says, “make that sound like it’s a bad thing.”

“Isn’t it?” says Sherlock.

“Mmm- _hmmm_ ,” says Jim.

There’s that old smile flickering over Jim’s mouth, the one that looks like a half-lit fuse and a gallon of petrol. It would be transparent on anyone else – but on him, it’s different. Like pieces of metal knitted together, link on link, and Sherlock has spent the last six months trying to work out a way to untangle it. 

He hasn’t managed it yet. But it’s a matter of time.

Something crumbles behind them, a wall or a ceiling giving way. Sherlock can hear the rising wail of sirens against the fire, against the solid, ravenous roar of it.

“You’re _thinking_ ,” Jim sing-songs, and then he leans in and licks a hot stripe up Sherlock’s neck.

 

\--

  
James Moriarty is twenty-six, a bit of a bastard, and twice as crazy as he appears to be.

He files his nails and he takes four sugars with his tea and he can put a bomb together, blindfolded, in less than a minute. Sherlock has seen those fingers moving in the sprawling mess of wires on his desk, delicate as a pianist’s, and he’s seen those same fingers on a woman’s throat. An exception, that time. An aberration. James Moriarty, like Sherlock Holmes, prefers to keep his hands clean of that sort of thing, if he can help it.

They look just as delicate on the trigger of a gun, and while trailing patterns on the skin of Sherlock’s hip.

Sherlock doesn’t know much about his history, except that James Moriarty died three years ago, and then forty-three days again after that. And then turned up a day later halfway around the world. He was caught on camera three times; Jim’s trademark trick of _I’m not done just yet_. Four weeks afterward, five buildings in the busiest parts of London went up.

Sherlock caught him, twice, but both of them knew it was only because Moriarty liked to be caught. There was a strange and twisted ego in that, a familiar thirst.

Mycroft called it loneliness, but then, what did Mycroft know anyway.

 

\--

  
The third time Sherlock caught him Moriarty was halfway through setting a timer and there was a dark smudge on his forehead, flaked paint in his hair, blood snaking down the side of his chin.

“Sherlock,” Moriarty said, an unflustered purr. “How good of you to pay a _personal_ visit.”

“Put it down,” Sherlock said.

Moriarty looked down at the bomb, at the numbers wavering in red on the dial. Then his eyes flicked back up to Sherlock’s face and peered at him coyly from underneath his lashes. Sherlock could see he was preparing to launch a performance, lob it straight into the barrel of Sherlock’s gun.

“What, this? It’s just a toy of mine. So very harmless. _Please_ don’t say you’ll take it away from me – you know how much I hate my toys taken away from me, it makes me all – _unhappy_ inside.”

“You’re making an assumption that I care,” Sherlock said.

“Don’t you?”

“Not really,” Sherlock said. And there it was – that fascination, the one he’d never been able to shake. The way Moriarty’s eyes slid right past the gun like it wasn’t there. Like Sherlock wasn’t even a threat.

Moriarty slipped his hands neatly into his pockets. “The assumptions I make are usually correct. That’s one of the advantages of being _me_ , you see.”

“And me,” Sherlock said.

Moriarty smiled at him, as if Sherlock had just wandered into one of his traps.

“We could be something,” he said. It was strange to hear his voice as it was, without its usual dramatic lilts and dips. It put Sherlock on edge. It was a challenge. “We could be _interesting_ together. We could do so much more damage. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted, Sherlock – to do some _damage_? I could show you. We could make this place _burn_.”

“Or I could just shoot you,” Sherlock said.

“Don’t be so boring,” Moriarty sighed, lip curling slightly. “So many creative things to do with a gun, and the best one you can come up with is _shooting_ me?”

Sherlock lowered the barrel, steered it to Moriarty’s kneecap. “I never said I was going to shoot to kill.”

“No. You’d shoot to _hurt_ , wouldn’t you?”

Sherlock said nothing.

“See?” Moriarty said, tipping up on his toes for a few long seconds in the parody of an excited child. “You, and me, my dear. We’re similar. We both know that _hurting_ is much more fun.”

“We’re not similar.”

“Don’t be deliberately dull. It’s a bad look on you."

“Desperation is a bad look on _you_."

Something slipped visibly in Moriarty’s expression. Sherlock held the gun steady as the sharp flash of anger twisted its way through Moriarty’s mouth. 

A firm chunk of satisfaction dropped into Sherlock’s stomach, heavy and surprisingly resonant. 

_Good._

 

\--

  
Sherlock Holmes is twenty-eight, brilliant to the point of half-suicidal, lean-limbed, arachnoid, spinning in the hectic way a compass will when precisely placed at true North.

He has a hate for the masses of London city rivalled only by the love he has for them.

It is something that he can’t explain, but it is the _only_ thing Sherlock Holmes can’t explain.

 

\--

  
A week later, Moriarty’s murdered ten people in different compartments of the same train. All at the same time, like something out of a horror story, and the blood in Sherlock’s ears positively _sings_.

“Did you like my present?” Jim says afterward. Sherlock is still in a taxi half an hour away but he can picture the way Jim is holding the phone, the smooth slouch of his spine on the hotel bed. His voice sounds different through a phone line – less unpredictable, a shade tamer, and Sherlock knows he works hard to counter that. “I made it especially for you.”

“You’re always sentimental after you’ve had a drink.”

“Oh, _good_ ,” Jim says, and Sherlock can hear him tapping loudly on the glass to make the point. “Tell me what I’m wearing, then. Or, better still, tell me what I’m _not_.”

“Handcuffs,” says Sherlock. “But you’ll be wearing them soon.”

“Will I?” Jim says, sounding delighted. “Are you going to come and clap me behind bars?”

Sherlock says nothing, peering out of the taxi’s window and wishing the driver would put his foot down.

“I hope you’re hurrying home,” Jim says after a moment. “I hope you’re thinking about me. Have you cracked it yet, my dear? I know how that gets you hot under the collar, putting together all those little _puzzles_. Have you worked it out?”

“Poison in the newspaper ink,” Sherlock says. “Ingested when they licked their thumbs to turn the page.”

“Yes, but _what_ poison? Don’t be vague, now. People are only vague when they don’t _know_.”

“Something potent. The dose must’ve been miniscule – unless there was transdermal absorption as well, which narrows it down to something which – ” Sherlock pauses, hearing the shift in Moriarty’s clothes. “You’re just _dying_ to tell me right now, aren’t you?”

“Not yet _dying_ ,” Jim laughs. There’s a tiny clatter – a cufflink rolling onto a bedside table.

Something irritable twitches in Sherlock’s wrist. “Don’t.”

“Oh, you know I wouldn’t,” Jim says. “I won’t get started without you. Not on your _birthday_.”

 

\--

  
Jim Moriarty owned a cluttered corkboard on which Sherlock had stapled a map of London. There were multi-coloured pins, sorted in some haphazard scheme that Sherlock hadn’t worked out yet, stabbed into over a quarter of the streets, the buildings. Three on the Thames itself. And one over 221B Baker Street, a white pin, the only white pin on the board.

Sherlock sat in front of it every other day, fingers steepled underneath his chin, cross-legged.

“If you’re going to stare at that thing,” Jim said, hip cocked in the doorway, “you might as well stay over. It might even be _fun_. I’ll forgive the fact that you didn’t bring flowers.”

“Quiet,” Sherlock snapped.

Jim smirked at him, that old crooked look that meant something.

Sherlock did stay over, curled up on the couch with his knees pulled completely up to his chest. He stared at the corkboard until the deductions left him in a dizzying comet-trail of thought and counter-thought, until he could sense more than hear the sound of Moriarty’s breathing from the next room over.

He didn’t sleep that night.

 

\--

  
The first man Moriarty killed – as he told Sherlock later, stretched out across Sherlock’s lap like a heavy, angular, contented cat – was out of necessity. 

Sherlock was probably the only other person in the world who understood how _boring_ necessity became after a while.

 

\--

  
Lestrade comes over on a Tuesday. Sherlock is in a bad mood. But then he usually is, stewing in an empty apartment, mentally picking apart the thready clues Moriarty’s left him the week before. Driving the neighbours batty with his violin.

“Are you coming?” Lestrade says, hovering in the doorway.

Lestrade is the type to push and pull by small increments. It’s something that’s always been frustrating – more so today, when Sherlock is nowhere near the mood to put up with imbecilic questions and the suspicious glances Donovan gives him, not even bothering to wait until he’s turned his back. Moriarty is always more interesting. He’s slippery, and whimsical, and overwhelmingly cruel, and Sherlock has never been more fascinated by anyone in his life.

“It’s a triple homicide in a locked room,” Lestrade says for the second time. Incredulous. “Windows locked, doors bolted. Not a peep of evidence anywhere. We can’t make head or tail of it.”

“ _And_?” Sherlock prompts.

“And – aren’t you interested?”

“Not in the least,” Sherlock says, and puts the violin to his shoulder again.

Lestrade stands for a moment, uncomprehending. “Sherlock, if you think I’m going to beg you – ”

“Then don’t.”

“Are you trying to make a point here? Is there something I’ve missed? No, don’t answer that question,” Lestrade says, when Sherlock raises a brow. “Of course I’ve missed something. What is it this time? Would you like me to order Anderson off the team?”

“Out of the country, more like,” Sherlock mutters. “Or, better still – order yourself out of my room, I’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“Like _what_?” Lestrade says.

He’s looking around as if expecting someone to pop out of the shadows. Sherlock can almost _smell_ his panic, thick in the air, and Sherlock wonders for a black, delicious second whether or not to tell the truth.

He doesn’t, in the end. Moriarty still feels like a secret – Sherlock doesn’t want to share him with anyone.

 

\--

  
“I’m not going to work with you,” Sherlock said, and that was true.

“No-one asked you to _work_ with me,” said Moriarty, wrinkling his nose a little. His gaze was flat and Sherlock gave him credit for it. The sun came in sideways between the blinds and it would’ve been easy for Jim to look very small, for the pale skin of his throat to seem vulnerable, and then that would’ve been the end of everything. It was satisfying that Jim knew how to hold his own.

Sherlock jumped when Moriarty walked his fingers up Sherlock’s arm and directly into the crook of his neck. Fluttering, for a second, at the edge of his pulse. Almost reverent.

“Then what are you asking,” said Sherlock, suddenly frustrated in a way he couldn’t define.

Moriarty’s mouth twitched down into half of a frown, half a smile.

“Don’t ask questions you won’t like the answers to,” he said, and that much was true as well.

 

\--

  
Sherlock never makes calls to Jim unprepared, but this time he makes an exception. 

“To what do I owe the _pleasure_ ,” Jim says, warbling the words deep inside his throat. He sounds like he’s walking somewhere outdoors; Sherlock can hear the rumbling buzz of traffic, the occasional bark of a vehicle horn. The rasp of Jim’s breath against the speaker.

“I’ve got you,” Sherlock says. “You’ve slipped up this time.”

“Oh, have I?” Jim says.

“Do you want to hear it?” says Sherlock. He’s got the Petri dish right in front of him and it makes him feel dizzy, that unmistakeable rush he gets every time the pieces slot together for him. “I have a trail, a verifiable, solid trail, leading straight from the body to your apartment. To you. I’ve got enough to take you to Court. I could have you out of the game by the end of the month.”

Jim laughs, a little breathless. “Really? How novel.”

“I could call Lestrade right this minute,” Sherlock says.

“You _could_ ,” Jim says, and Sherlock’s fingers tighten in anticipation on the edge of the dish. “But instead, you’re on the phone to _me_. In the mood for another distraction, then? I don’t usually operate on-call, as you know, but I’m sure I can orchestrate something _just_ for you.”

“Where are you?” says Sherlock.

“Wouldn’t _you_ like to know,” Jim trills, laughing again. “You and your little brigade of toy soldiers.”

Sherlock says nothing, cataloguing the brazen leaps in Moriarty’s voice. It makes his ribs tight, makes his pulse pick up like something strung on the wind. 

He holds his breath.

“I’ve got a key,” he says finally.

“And I’ve got half a ton of TNT packed into the walls of your flat,” Jim says.

“No, you don’t.”

“Don’t trust my word for it?” Jim is grinning. Sherlock can hear it, picture it. Almost taste it. “You should. I’m the only person in the world whose word you _can_ trust, my dear, because I’m the one who’s going to kill you.”

A slight shiver bubbles up beneath Sherlock’s spine. “You make it sound like I’m not going to kill you first.”

“ _Are_ you?”

Jim’s voice is playfully eager, and when Sherlock hears it – the sound of the intersection half a block away from the rear entrance at Barts – he shifts in his seat, staring down at the drop of blood in the dish. _Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim._ He wants suddenly to put his finger in it, to ink his print on a piece of paper with it.

“Told you so,” Jim sings at him mockingly, but there’s a touch of softness in there as well.

 

\--

  
Sherlock often let his intellect wander into places where it had no right to be. He liked parsing out possibilities – sometimes, with the amount of information he got on a minute-to-minute basis, he couldn’t help but follow each one to its absolute end. _Molly – asking a question – if you say yes – bother, coffee, haircut, lipstick, paperwork, paperwork, grubby old diner with gum under the table, half a month, insufferable, not worth the effort, she’ll move up North anyway when her mum gets that adenocarcinoma checked out –_

“You should get a flatmate, you know,” Mrs Hudson said, trying to dust around the flasks on the kitchen table.

Sherlock sniffed and pulled his feet up underneath his body. 

_If you say yes – bother, explanations, coffee, trying to accommodate someone who actually sleeps, John Smith, John Doe, violin before seven, nicotine, Mycroft, murder, insufferable, pretending to be civil, good God, house key, dog ears in the fridge, no-one who could bear you anyway, no space in this flat, TNT in the walls, boredom, boredom, boredom, Jim._

“Just you cooped up in this apartment by yourself, Sherlock – how you don’t go mad with it, I don’t know.”

“Nothing to say I’m not,” Sherlock droned, staring up at the watermarks on the roof.

 

\--

  
“You’re awfully sure of yourself,” Sherlock said the first time Jim appeared at his bedroom door.

“Look me in the eye and tell me you don’t like it,” Jim said, smile slanting, “and I promise I’ll stop.”

Sherlock kept his mouth shut.

The kiss took him a bit by surprise – not because he hadn’t seen it coming, but because he’d expected Jim to kiss differently. He’d expected more heat, something with sharper edges. Instead, Jim kissed like an open palm, nothing hidden, as plain as a bleached white sheet. 

Sherlock wasn’t interested in confessions. Sherlock wanted something _more_.

“I’ve disappointed you,” Jim said, the moment they broke apart. He had his fingers tangled in Sherlock’s shirt, caught in the gaps between the buttons. His mouth and eyes gave nothing away.

“Yes,” Sherlock said, and that was that.

It cured them, at least, because Jim cottoned on and his kisses were different after that night. Sherlock appreciated that. He liked the nights when neither of them could make head or tail of the other. Sherlock Holmes wanted to be the one to solve every puzzle the universe dealt to him, and there wasn’t very much enjoyment to be had in solving a puzzle someone else had already solved.


End file.
